Book: The Last Girl
Author: Nadia Murad and Jenna Krajeski
Publisher: Hhachette India
Pages: 306; Price: Rs 499
Being a completely disinterested book reviewer, seldom do I recommend any book with euphoric effusiveness. But I'm making an exception for Nadia Murad’s chilling account of her days of captivity and relentless fight against the ISIS (Islamic State of Iraq & Syria). This is one book that must embellish the shelves of all book-lovers.
As you flip through the pages, you begin to ask: How can humans be so diabolically bad, nay evil like the ISIS goons? In hardly four years of their fractured rule in that part of the world, they terrorised and terrified not only the people they ruled over, but the entire civilised world.
The scourge of wrath of these lawless rogues fell specifically on the Yazidi community. The author and the victim Nobel laureate (2018) Nadia Murad belongs to this Kurdish-speaking minority which is different from Islam.
The ISIS guys plundered, massacred and enslaved Yazidi men and women and ravaged them at their will. Nadia Murad lost her mother and six brothers in a single day of blood-bath! That she retained her mental equilibrium and equipoise despite such torments, tempests and turmoil is something that cannot be imagined.
In this book, the young lass minces no words and thrashes ISIS. Yazidis are heretics to orthodox Muslims. In spite of that, this community lived in Iraq rather peacefully until the ISIS emerged in the summer of 2014.
What they did is now known to the whole world but how they desecrated women of the Yazidi community is slowly coming out, thanks to the likes of Nadia and Jenna Krajeski.
Every page makes you think and the helpless and lachrymose account of Nadia’s untold sufferings moves you no end. Her angst becomes yours and her anger simmers you as well. Nadia has also questioned the tepid reactions coming from the Islamic world, especially from the nations where Sunni Islam is predominant.
A must-read book for all those who labour under the misconception that humans have evolved. Seeing and reading the gory details of ISIS members, one has to think otherwise.
